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New York Times public editor: Progressive worldview 'bleeds through' the Times

By Dylan Byers

08/25/12 02:20 PM EDT

Arthur Brisbane, the departing public editor at the New York Times, has accused the paper of having a progressive bias, even as he champions its disciplined approach to fair and balanced reporting.

"When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so," Brisbane writes in his final column. "Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times."

"As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects," he continues.

Brisbane's parting shot -- a rare instance in which the paper of record has been accused of bias, and championing causes, from the inside -- comes at the end of his two-year tenure as public editor, during which he was tasked with critiquing the paper's reporting. (Margaret Sullivan, the former editor of the Buffalo News, takes over next week.) Brisbane also writes that the paper is "hardly transparent," despite efforts to increase transparency.

The Times has long dedicated itself to a mission of straight-forward, unbiased reporting, even as right-wing critics have sought to define it as a liberal media outlet. As Brisbane notes, a new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that The Times’s “believability rating” has "dropped drastically among Republicans compared with Democrats, and was an almost-perfect mirror opposite of Fox News’s rating."

"[A] kind of Times Nation has formed around the paper’s political-cultural worldview," Brisbane writes, "an audience unbound by geography (as distinct from the old days of print) and one that self-selects in digital space."